TapCounsel for the Defence

6 May 2006 11:28 by Rick

Like many others, when I need relaxation I turn to crime fiction. In fact there are so many of us that I am surprised that all crime in Oxford has not already been solved by Morse and Kate Ivory between them and that there is any one left in the Midsomer district, the residents all having been murdered or locked up.

What struck me as strange is that when our cases come to court we suddenly cross the bench and abandon the police and investigators who have brought the suspect before the jury. Now our heroes are the defence lawyers. We loved Perry Mason and Kavanagh. I can think of two reasons why this may be.

Assuming that we are innocent, if we are wronged then we would want the trusty PI or PC to find out who done it. However, if for some reason we are accused then it is the lawyer who is on our side to put things right.

Secondly, and what makes for a better story, was highlighted by Michael Connelly (The Lincoln Lawyer Orion:2005 ISBN 0-75287-955-3). He says (paraphrased)

The scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. With a guilty client you do your best for them but with an innocent client there is no acceptable verdict but Not Guilty.

And this is the excitement of the story, very much related to our own fears of ending up in this situation, we are hanging on for the truth to be revealed and the accused to walk free.

Of course life is not like that, the innocent are always scarred by crime. Even if acquitted, they have probably lost their job, savings and reputation in the intervening period so we must depend on the investigators to get it right in the first place. By the time the lawyers get involved, it is too late.

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TapGreen Geek ?

5 May 2006 12:15 by Rick

This week I did my bit for the environment; I unplugged my phone charger from the wall.

But seriously, how green are we techno-adicts. I did a quick audit of what is switched on and running when we are not even in the house.

  • Cable Modem
  • UPS
  • Router
  • Ethernet Switch
  • Wireless Access point
  • NAS controller
  • NAS drive
  • Print controller
  • Printer (in standby)

Each of these has it’s own Wall Wart. And in the domestic quarter…

  • 1/2 the HiFi amp (only the power amp half has an on/off switch)
  • FM Tuner (because it sounds better if kept warm)
  • Mini-disc recorder in standby (no power switch)
  • TV Digi box (would standby save anything here?)
  • VCR in standby
  • Various electric clocks
  • The fridge/freezer
  • Cordless phone system
  • Central heating controller
  • Doorbell transformer

It would be interesting to watch the meter to see exacly how much this lot consumes. It looks bad but we have made some effort; the router is a recycled PC so that has saved a chunk of landfill; we do switch the TV right off these days (mostly because we rarely watch it) Some other domestic stuff is chosen for its economy.

What more can we do?

Posted in Miscellaneous, Technical | 1 Comment »

TapTracking comments

24 Apr 2006 09:21 by Rick

I will quote another blogger (AR) here because it is an important insight. Unfortunately he is on an internal blog on our company system so not otherwise accessible

One of my main beefs with blogging, for like, oh, forever now is that there isn’t really a good way to track comments. When I post a comment on someone’s blog, I don’t want to have to repeatedly check that blog to see if anyone responded to my comment. Some blogs have evolved to support RSS feeds for all of the comments, or for the comments on a particular post. But I don’t like this idea either, mainly because I don’t want to have to manage a whole series of comment RSS feeds in my RSS reader.

An idea AR is experimenting with is to use a second instance of the Planet aggregator to collect all the comments to blogs on the Company Planet but this is not entirely satisfactory because it isolates the comments from their context (the original post) and also from other comments if the thread takes off with a life of its own.

Doing it the hard way, I have discovered the same thing. I subscribe to the comments feed of some of my favourite blogs but what I get is a random selection of remarks unrelated to their predecessors and the original context. This is not so bad in the early life of a post because you can usually remember what has gone recently before but getting a “me too, but such-and-such” to a post that is a week or more old is just meaningless static using this method. I also get comments to posts which had no interest for me in the first place.

IMHO a good start would be some sort of dynamic feed which generates entries to the comment stream of a post iff I have commented previously in the thread. Another approach I am thinking of is a method that automatically subscribes to the comment stream of an individual post as I make a comment. It would need to eliminate duplicates but also would need a configurable time-out so that old streams drop off either after a time lapse or perhaps if they go dormant for a period.

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TapWhat is a vegetarian

12 Apr 2006 15:03 by Rick

Tesco don’t seem to know.

Tesco Vegetarian label

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TapPaging Dr. McCoy

6 Apr 2006 16:45 by Rick

Now this is what technology is all about, making people’s lives easier—and it’s in Cornwall too!

voice-activated handsfree ‘badges’, worn around the neck on a lanyard, which can put any user in touch with another member of staff just by saying their name

Voice Activated Pager

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TapAscii Art

3 Apr 2006 21:54 by Rick

The Who - My Generation

When we were clearing out the study a few weeks ago to make way for carpet fitters, one of the things that came to light was all the old Ascii Art pictures I did (and stole) in the ’70s. Lots of Snoopy and the famous one of Raquel for instance. It was a pleasant find today, thanks to a pointer from Inky Circus, that the concept has been “updated” to Ascii Art Videos—Pop Videos with suitably pre-Sinclair quality sound (almost Stylaphone!) As you would expect my favourites are “My Generation”, “Paranoid” and “Purple Haze” with an also-ran for “Gimme All Your Lovin'” Find them at C505.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

TapMad IDeas

31 Mar 2006 09:12 by Rick

I will try to keep my remarks polite now that they have passed the ludicrous bill about ID cards. Here are a couple of points to ponder.

The nearest Passport Office to Penzance, a place with which I have some affinity, is Newport, Wales. According to the terms of the bill, you will be required to visit a passport office to be photographed and fingerprinted.

The chances of the Home Office establishing the necessary IT systems to support the National Identity Register by 2008 are virtually zero.

For further thoughts see my old but still valid rant about the idea.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Mad IDeas

TapIgnored Standards

28 Mar 2006 10:21 by Rick

It is often hailed that Firefox and Opera are “Standards Compliant Browsers”; even Internet Explorer is not bad most of the time. It is a little known secret, however, that they are only compliant when it suits them (and us).

When it comes to handling “CSS floats”, that is sections of the content that push to the left or right of the window and allow the remainder to flow around them, what they do is work out the size of the content of the float and then position it according to instructions. If you don’t specify a width for the container then it is determined by the width of the content. This is what designers like as it allows them flexibility and a fluid layout.

However the Standard says

A floated box must have an explicit width (assigned via the ‘width’ property, or its intrinsic width in the case of replaced elements)

Only Internet Explorer on the Mac obeys this rule and creates havoc with some styling. Now this browser is dying out rapidly, it went out of development in Jun 2003 and out of support in Dec 2005, but it still lingers on, especially among genealogists it seems.

Yes, we can hack around it but that is not the issue. If we want the design that we are used to, then the standard needs to be changed, otherwise we tempt anarchy.

Posted in Browsers, Technical | Comments Off on Ignored Standards

TapEmail dates

19 Mar 2006 17:26 by Rick

One of the oddities of Thunderbird, compared with other mail programs that I am used to, is that it time stamps the emails using the time they were (apparently) sent according to the clock on the sender’s system. This has some strange effects with mail from people with incorrect clocks, most noticable in spam. Whether it is because they are using hijacked systems to send the mail or it is some devious ploy I don’t know, but I have had mail in the last few weeks with dates from 1 Jan 1970 (just one) through 14 Mar 2000 up until 18 Mar 2007. The old ones go straight from the junk mail box to deleted, but the post-dated ones hang around at the front of the junk box for ages.

Posted in email, Technical | Comments Off on Email dates

TapComputing by ear

14:53 by Rick

I feel that this is an art that is rapidly disappearing.

In the old days (excuse me while I fetch my pipe and slippers) we could tell what a system or program was doing by watching Das Blinkenlights. You got to recognise certain patterns and, when the printer started, whether it was results or errors by the sound. Kind programmers deliberately created certain patterns to reassure the operators and other patterns to warn of errors or actions needed to be done, like loading a new tape. I can recall one programmer who used the speed of the hammers on a line printer to create tunes. I think it was the same chap who caused the twin round screens on the Cyber 74 to wink

Later when disk drives came along, you could tell what was running and if it was happy by listening to the head movement. I surprised myself yesterday by using the same technique to find bad spots on Mary’s laptop. Just by listening you could tell the head was repeatedly seeking and a chkdsk was needed. I wonder how long we will be able to do that as drives get quieter (and my hearing goes)?

Posted in Miscellaneous, Technical | Comments Off on Computing by ear

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